Beau Willimon Joins James Mangold’s ‘Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi’ Movie As Co-Writer
Beau Willimon, the screenwriter behind the three-episode prison arc in Andor season 1, is set to co-write James Mangold’s Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi movie for Lucasfilm, The Hollywood Reporter said today.
The film was announced last year at Star Wars Celebration and is in the very early stages of development. At the time of the convention, Mangold was wrapped up in post-production of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and was supposed to shoot the Bob Dylan biopic, starring Timothée Chalamet, immediately after. The six-month strike pumped the brakes on those plans, with the film, titled A Complete Unknown, being pushed into March 2024. It’s been shooting for over a month in New York now.
Once that’s done, Mangold will turn his attention to Star Wars. With a co-writer now on board, perhaps Lucasfilm could get around to this sooner than we expected, as Mangold will probably be busy editing the Searchlight film until Labor Day, at least.
A small detail, but still of note, is that The Hollywood Reporter is referring to the film as Dawn of the Jedi, which we previously thought was just a tentative title until they found a definitive one. That may still be the case, though, but it’s at least worth pointing out that this doesn’t just refer to the era the film is set in.
Willimon is returning to write for Andor season 2. He got an Emmy nomination for writing episode 10 of season 1, “One Way Out”, which featured the tragic moment of “I can’t swim” as well as the iconic monologue from Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård). He’s also an Oscar-nominated scribe for The Ides of March and previously worked on Netflix’s House of Cards, which he co-created with David Fincher.
Dawn of the Jedi will travel 25,000 years in the past to tell the story of the origins of the Jedi. This was something that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the Game of Thrones creators, were previously developing for Lucasfilm, before Kathleen Kennedy and her team decided they were no longer interested in telling that story, back in 2019. Some time after that there was clearly a change of plans, which Benioff and Weiss are not very happy about, as indicated by their facial expressions when the topic was brought up in a recent interview with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
No release date has been announced for Dawn of the Jedi, but given the current state of things, we don’t expect this movie to roll out before December 2027. (A Complete Unknown hasn’t been dated either, but that’s probably not coming out until 2025’s awards season.) Disney just confirmed that The Mandalorian & Grogu will be hitting theaters on May 22, 2026, and the Daisy Ridley-led New Jedi Order is poised to take over the Dec. 18, 2026, spot (still unconfirmed, though).
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
